1 Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and service for performing symmetrical multi-processor (SMP) computer system bring-up, and particularly to parallelizing operations while maintaining granularity flexibility while sending commands and gathering status over a multi-node system.
2. Description of Background
In large-scale systems using an Elastic Interface which is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 6,671,753 issued Dec. 30, 2003; U.S. Pat. No. 6,571,346 issued May 27, 2003 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,334,163 issued Dec. 25, 2001 and entitled “Elastic interface apparatus and method therefor” and characteristic of IBM's computer systems, the Elastic Interface is calibrated for the system. Running a system through an Elastic Interface calibration & diagnostic sequence presents two problems. A large-scale computer system such as those provided by IBM have multiple nodes and a many elastic interfaces use to interconnect the various chips and modules of these systems, so a first problem could be said to be: “How do you send commands and read status to/from the interface/s?”, and a second problem could be said to be: “How do you speed up the entire process when there can be hundreds of interfaces that need to be calibrated?”.
Other methods are typically geared toward small-scale systems where only a few interfaces need to be calibrated and bring-up time is not an issue. Our solution is applicable to multiple interface systems, but in these small scale other systems, hardware (such as hard coded counters) are used to trigger controls and status is allocated to a small number of registers. The current, large scale system and more complex Elastic Interface requires the ability to gather status more quickly and set a larger number of registers for each interface.